Avi Loeb

Oh, yeah.

That's my point, that 3i Atlas is a million times more massive, at least a million times more massive than Oumuamua.

And I immediately, as it was discovered, it was July 1st.

And my wife asked me to go on vacation to Aruba two days later.

And as I was going on the plane and as I arrived there, I realized, wait, that doesn't make sense because we should have seen millions of Oumuamua before we saw this one.

You know, it's so big.

And I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade.

You would expect it at the very optimistic time

where you package all the material into objects that are five kilometer in diameter, you would imagine once per 10,000 years.

So I wrote immediately a scientific paper.

My wife was not happy that on our vacation, I was sitting on my computer, but I just couldn't resist it.

And by the way, this paper I submitted for publication, that was July 3rd or something.

And then the editor said,

oh, the paper is fine, but you have a concluding sentence at the end where you say, well, unless the object is smaller than estimated...

Maybe it was targeting the inner solar system.

That was my solution to say, you know, one way out of this dilemma of why is it so big is if it was targeting the inner solar system by design.

And indeed, the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the sun to within five degrees.

The chance for that at random is one in 500.

Okay.

And it's moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets, which is ideal for it to release mini probes that will get into the planets.